Isaac Babel - Collected Stories

Introduction

A GOOD MANY YEARS AGO, IN 1 929, I CHANCED TO READ A

book which disturbed me in a way I can still remember.

The book was called Red Cavalry; it was a collection of

stories about Soviet regiments on horse operating in Poland.

I had never heard of the author, Isaac Babel--or I. Babel

as he signed himself-and nobody had anything to tell me

about him, and part of my disturbance was the natural

shock we feel when, suddenly and without warning, we

confront a new talent of great energy and boldness. But the

book was disturbing for other reasons as well.

In those days one still spoke of the "Russian experiment"

and one might still believe that the light of dawn glowed on

the test-tubes and crucibles of human destiny. And it was

still possible to have very strange expectations of the new

culture that would arise from the Revolution. I do not

remember what my own particular expectations were, ex

cept that they involved a desire for an art that would have

as little ambiguity as a proposition in logic. Why I wanted

this I don't wholly understand. It was as if I had hoped

that the literature of the Revolution would realize some

simple, inadequate notion of the "classical" which I had

picked up at college; and perhaps I was drawn to this

notion of the classical because I was afraid of the literature

of modern Europe, because I was scared of its terrible

intensities, ironies, and ambiguities. If this is what I really

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IO INTRODUCTION

felt, I can't say that I am no'Y wholly ashamed of my

cowardice. If we stop to think of the museum knowingness

about art which we are likely to acquire with maturity, of

our consumer's pride in buying only the very best spiritual

commodities, the ones which are sure to give satisfaction,

there may possibly be a grace in those moments when we

lack the courage to confront, or the strength to endure,

some particular work of art or kind of art . At any rate,

here was Babel's book and I found it disturbing. It was

obviously the most remarkable work of fiction that had yet

come out of revolutionary Russia, the only work, indeed,

that I knew of as having upon it the mark of exceptional

talent, even of genius. Yet for me it was all too heavily

charged with the intensity, irony, and ambiguousness from

which I wished to escape.

There was anomaly at the very heart of the book, for

the Red cavalry of the title were Cossack regiments, and

why were Cossacks fighting for the Revolution, they who

were the instrument and symbol of Tsarist repression ? The

author, who represented himself in the stories, was a Jew ;

and a Jew in a Cossack regiment was more than an anom

aly, it was a joke, for between Cossack and Jew there

existed not merely h atred but a polar opposition. Yet here

was a Jew riding as a Cossack and trying to come to terms

with the Cossack ethos. At that first reading it seemed to me

-although it does not now-that the stories were touched

with cruelty. They were about violence of the most extreme

kind, yet they were composed with a striking elegance and

precision of objectivity, and also with a kind of lyric joy,

so that one could not at once know just how the author

was responding to the brutality he recorded, whether he

thought it good or bad, justified or not justified .